


Birthday Cards for Kaito

by Signel_chan



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing
Genre: Birthday, F/M, Fluff, Reminiscing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-12
Updated: 2020-04-12
Packaged: 2021-03-01 20:46:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,503
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23613244
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Signel_chan/pseuds/Signel_chan
Summary: In a box in his closet, Kaito keeps a collection of all the birthday cards from past years, as well as a picture from the day.
Relationships: Harukawa Maki/Momota Kaito
Comments: 1
Kudos: 24





	Birthday Cards for Kaito

Every year on his birthday, after whatever celebrations were planned had ended and the house was empty of everyone except who lived there, Kaito went into his closet and pulled out a box that was crudely painted and covered in stars and opened it, revealing a large stack of birthday cards that he had received over the years. It was something his grandparents had started for him on his first birthday, keeping all of the cards that other relatives had sent him (as well as their own, one from each of them), followed by a picture of the three of them at wherever it had been that they’d gone to honor the occasion. Then came the next year’s cards and the accompanying picture, and the next year’s, and so on until he got to the most recent year’s and could place the ones he’d just gotten that day, as well as a copy of the picture his grandparents made sure to print immediately for him.

He knew most of the cards just from the sight of the front, but every year he went through them all anyway, taking in the notes from relatives that more often than not had disappeared from his life, then notes from former friends, then finally notes with more recognizable names attached to them. Looking at the pictures was a reminder of where he’d been and how young his grandparents had looked when he was younger, watching them grow old just like he watched himself aging year by year.

“I can’t believe I still do this,” he said to himself once he got to the cards from his teenage years, where he suddenly shot up in height and was taller than the people raising him, but still looked as goofy and immature as ever. Those were the cards where he could vaguely remember most of the people who’d given them to him, and almost every single one referred to his passionate love of outer space in some way. “It’s like a time capsule, except I dig it up every year for some reason.”

Glancing at the stack he had to add from that year’s celebration, Kaito chuckled and kept on going, fully knowing the reason he was going through the cards. The largest pile of cards in the box came from his eighteenth birthday, where everyone was thankful to get to spend the occasion with him. He’d spent most of the previous year fighting for his life in the hospital from some illness that had attacked his lungs and kept him from being able to finish school in person with all of his friends, so when he was finally discharged and able to return to some semblance of normal life, they were all beyond happy to see him again. That was the hardest picture for him to look at as well, seeing his grandparents both having aged tremendously due to his health issues and looking at his bony, angular face and limbs.

Tucking that picture in line with the cards, he went on into the next birthday’s collection, where the top card was clearly creased and folded several times over. “Aw, that’s the first thing Maki Roll ever got for me,” he recalled, feeling the artificial ridges in the card before opening it, seeing the short, sweet, and romantic note that was inside: _Happy birthday, you idiot. Hope that’s a lot easier for you to understand than my feelings for you are._ Just reading her writing made his heart pick its pace up, but as much as he wanted to derail what he was doing to go take the card downstairs to her to remind her of where they’d started, he knew that leaving the bedroom would signal the end of what he was doing for a while.

Setting the card right behind the picture from his eighteenth birthday, he laughed, “We’ll just…remind her of that another time.” There weren’t too many other notable cards from that year, but the picture was the first one where he felt like he looked like the him that was sitting there looking through the cards, complete with facial hair and a grin that was hard to ignore. The next couple years were rather slim on individual cards, the only ones being the two from his grandparents, one from Maki, and then a few from other friends, but seeing the picture go from just being him and the people who’d raised him to him, his grandparents, and the woman he loved was what mattered most.

The first card in the stack for his twenty-second birthday was a handmade one by an artist friend of his, and when he saw the glittery cover he was taken back mentally to that birthday party, where everyone had shown up unannounced and thrown him a celebration that would’ve lasted long into the night had his grandparents not asked everyone to leave. That was the night that he realized just how entrenched in everyone’s business their whole group of friends really was, with people accusing each other of sleeping around behind backs and cheating on people they’d been with for years. He could vividly remember how tightly he’d held Maki’s hand to keep her from jumping into fights, and how he’d wished that most of them had never shown up at all. It had all been a continuation of a discussion that had happened months prior at a different sort of festivity, one that he’d wished would have ended when they’d sent everyone home from that prior engagement.

All of the cards for that year had personal touches that went back to that same discussion, and he couldn’t help but read through them, to remember the specifics of what had happened. They all started the same, excited that he was another year older, but it was what followed that was a direct reminder of the kind of friends he had: they either wished him good luck in regretting the rest of his life, or hoped that he’d have a happy relationship when so few others were going to. “Damn, I wonder if any of them remember writing these things,” he said as he went through the cards, knowing that he could have easily asked those questions earlier that night. “Everyone was just wrong about all of it, we’re happy and, well, most of ‘em are too, I think.”

Getting to the picture at the end felt like it took forever, but seeing his grandparents’ unamused expressions (after all, they’d had to endure the young adult drama all night unexpectedly) made him thankful he’d stuck with things. He fixated on them for a moment, before looking at him holding Maki up in his arms, her hair cascading down towards the floor and her eyes focused on his excited expression, cracking the smallest of smiles at him. Seeing the picture made him set everything down for just a moment, reclining back and considering going downstairs to try recreating that image with her, but he quickly reminded himself that if he left the bedroom he wasn’t going to be getting back to things that night.

Instead, he set all of those cards and the accompanying picture and moved right along to the next year’s batch. Right away his mouth opened up in a grin, knowing that the cards from his twenty-third birthday were an adventure to get through, and the memories of that little birthday party came flooding back. When he looked at the cover of the first card he couldn’t help but laugh, knowing that he’d set that one on top for a very specific reason: to remind him, in case he ever forgot, that almost everyone who gave him a card did it in a silly manner that didn’t match how old he was turning, by any means. That top card was written as if it was meant for someone at a baby shower, not a grown man, but when he opened it and read the personal note inside it was obvious that he was the intended recipient.

In fact, the only people who hadn’t been in on that joke were his grandparents, as each of their cards was heartfelt and was gushing about how _proud_ they were of the man their grandson had become. That was also obvious in the picture at the end of the stack, with how they were standing tall and smiling, unlike the previous year’s picture (but that was also because they had been well-informed that people were going to be gathering that year, and had encouraged it). Kaito didn’t spend much time looking at them, though, nor did he spend time looking at himself, even though he could tell just from a glance that he was standing in some awkward wide-leg pose so that he could bend down just a bit.

All at once, the realization that he was looking at something that had happened seven years before but felt so recent hit him, and he had to put the picture aside for a second to collect himself. When he got back to it, he did look closer at his grandparents and himself, and noticed their expressions being so joyful, but then his attention went right to Maki and her completely exhausted smile, the way she was leaning back into him, the way that their hands were one on top of the other as they held her stomach together. It almost didn’t seem real that it had been almost seven years since their first child had been born, but it was and that was just the way things were.

The next year’s cards were fewer in number and not especially memorable, but he didn’t care much about them at that point so much as he cared about getting to the picture, about seeing his grandparents holding their great-grandchild in their yearly family picture. He couldn’t help but grin a bit bigger thinking about just how small she had been back then, and how much she’d taken after him in the years since, nor could he help but realize that the picture he was holding was the only one in the box where it was just the five of them in it.

Going through the rest of the contents went quickly, because of the lack of cards, and with every picture he saw Kaito got more eager to get on to the newest one, which he hadn’t actually seen for himself yet. Twenty-five and twenty-six had similar pictures, each of the grandparents holding one of the great-granddaughters while he and Maki held each other somehow, and twenty-seven had the girls in their arms instead. The next picture had the girls on the floor trying to pose as cute as they could, the grandparents on either side looking much more weary than they had in years past, and the parents in the middle, him holding Maki up like he had before, but struggling to make it look quite as easy due to all of the life changes that had happened to them in the years between.

“That really was two years ago, huh,” he mumbled, setting the picture aside and getting the last set of cards from the box, almost at the end of the tunnel he’d entered when he opened the box. “When I look at it this way, it’s kinda like it all happened one thing after the other, but it didn’t. I don’t know what I would’ve done if it had, honestly.” The last cards were easily the most uninspired of the bunch, minus the one from his wife and children that had scribbles in it from the older two girls, and the picture hit home even harder than the previous one had. That was the family he was more familiar with, minus the fact that all three kids were a year older and definitely looked it, and it was hard to put that picture aside knowing that he was replacing it with the newest one.

But tradition had to be kept, and so he put it and all of the cards back into the box, moving on to the newest set he’d brought upstairs with him. Right on top was one with a crude drawing of who he assumed was supposed to be him, colored in with the brightest purples that didn’t quite do him justice. Inside was a note he could somewhat read, and that was what made it clear this card was from the middle child, the sweet little gem that shone so much like the stars she was named for. The next card was much neater, even if the words weren’t perfectly sensical as he read through them, but that one was obviously done by his sweet sunbeam of an oldest daughter, and she even signed it with her name a few times. After that came the usual fare, the cards from the grandparents and the friends who still gave them, but he quickly realized something was amiss—he didn’t have the card from Maki that he knew she’d given him, and he didn’t have the picture that his grandparents had already printed, which he could’ve sworn he’d put at the bottom of the stack.

“Guess that’s the end of that,” he said, putting all of them in with the rest, knowing that he would have to get back to it later once he had the missing two items. “I’ll just go check with Maki Roll to see if she hid them anywhere from me, and then I’ll finish this whenever she lets me.”

He knew it was late enough that all of the kids should have been in bed, so he made sure to be quiet as he left the bedroom and headed down the stairs, treading carefully to not make the steps creak too much. “Kaito, are you finally done?” he heard Maki wearily ask, loud enough that she didn’t seem worried about waking anyone up, but still quiet enough to not be intentionally disruptive. He gave her a response at the same volume and he heard her give a long groan but say nothing else until he was down in the room and could see that she was sitting in her favorite chair, their youngest daughter curled up in her lap with her thumb firmly in her mouth, fast asleep. “I’ve been stuck here since you went upstairs, could you maybe help me out?”

“Yeah, sure can do,” he replied, walking over to her and picking the girl up, barely causing her to stir before she went right back to sleep. “Should I put her in her bed, or…” He trailed off as he noticed both of their other children were also asleep there in the room, having brought out blankets and pillows to make themselves comfortable.

“I told them they could sleep out here for once, figure we might want to let all three of them do it, in case someone wants to get jealous.” Stretching now that she didn’t have a toddler on her lap, Maki watched as Kaito looked around for somewhere to set the girl, eventually settling on laying her in the spot where he would’ve sat down for himself. “You aren’t going to stay down here, huh?”

Feeling a little guilty about what his intentions were, Kaito brought a hand to the back of his head and scratched at it, trying to come up with a good way to word what he needed to do before giving up on it. “Yeah, I realized I didn’t have everything and I only came down to get your card and my grandparents’ picture so I could finish up…but if you need me to stay, you know I’ll do it for ya, Maki Roll! You and the girls mean more to me than any of this birthday stuff does!”

“I mean, you staying out here to keep an eye on them real quick would be helpful, but I get it, you want to get things done before it’s not your birthday anymore.” She chuckled as she got up out of the chair, stretching again before coming to give him a hug from the side, burrowing her face into his chest. “We’re old, Kaito. Almost ancient at this point.”

“That’s not true, we’ve still got a whole bunch of years in us before we can be called old! You saw my grandparents tonight, they were havin’ a blast and they’ve got a bunch of years on both of us!” He leaned down and kissed the top of her head, which smelled like the frosting from the birthday cake that they’d all enjoyed earlier. “We aren’t gonna be old until these girls have kids, and those kids have kids, sound like a deal?”

“I don’t want to think about that happening,” she admitted, pulling him in a bit closer. “At this rate, if we do what your grandparents have done, we’re going to be going to a _lot_ of birthday parties for the rest of our lives. What were we thinking, doing this to ourselves?”

Knowing exactly what she was referring to, Kaito could only laugh and kiss her head again. “It’s all gonna be okay, we’ll be the coolest old people when the time comes. And besides, maybe they won’t all have a million kids themselves, then we’ll not have to do so much. Gotta think about the positive possibilities.”

“You wording it like that makes me think you think _we_ have a million kids.” Maki pulled away from him, looking up into his eyes with hers narrowed, before she couldn’t help but laugh for herself. “I mean, if you’d told me when I first started dating you that we’d be on our fourth kid by the time we were both thirty, I would’ve spat in your face and told you to leave me alone but…things happened, huh?”

“They sure did, and I wouldn’t change a single one of ‘em.” He watched her face relax and she left the room as she’d said she wanted to, leaving him there with the three sleeping angels he sometimes couldn’t believe were actually his children. Every day he found himself in awe that someone like him could raise such perfect beings, and every night he found himself in disbelief that someone like Maki would want to have kids with him, but everything was exactly as it needed to be. Now that his birthday was out of the way, they could focus on how they were going to break the news to the girls that there was going to be another one of them to add to the mix, and that was exciting to think about.

He collapsed in Maki’s chair and kept looking at the girls as they slept, each of them in their own position doing their own thing, and even though they weren’t awake they were all showing their fierce personalities that he also couldn’t believe belonged to kids of his. But his mind was drifting back to what he’d come downstairs for in the first place, and he looked at the table beside the chair to see what he was missing sitting there, waiting for him. The card Maki had picked out for him was space-themed, which he enjoyed, but it was what she’d written inside that mattered more— _Happy birthday to the only man I’d ever consider raising an army with. Keep shooting for the stars, it’s the only thing paying for feeding these hungry mouths you’ve created._

Beneath it was the picture his grandparents had made sure to get to them before they’d gone home for the night, with three beautiful dark-haired girls sitting at everyone’s feet, the grandparents both leaning on their grandson’s shoulders for support while he had his arms wrapped around his dearest wife. The one the next year was going to be incredibly different, he already knew that, but he had a whole year to look forward to it, as well as the trip down memory lane when he went through the whole box of cards again.

“Oh, you found it after all,” Maki said when she came back into the room to see him staring at the picture with a smile on his face. “I thought you wouldn’t notice it was there. We look pretty good, all things considered. Can’t really tell what we’ve been through lately.”

“It’s because we’re a family of stars, we shine bright no matter what’s going on.” It was cheesy and he knew it, but to hear Maki crack up into laughter at his dumb comment was worth making it in the first place. “And we’re just going to keep shining brighter, each and every one of us.” He’d make it to putting the picture and the card away eventually, but right then he felt that spending the last moments of his birthday was best. He wouldn’t have been anywhere without them, and they were the light that guided him in the darkness, the literal stars that he loved most.

**Author's Note:**

> some of you may recognize this as a different version of a conversation that ended a different fic of mine. let's just say that I wanted to explore that again, this time in a much happier context c:


End file.
